Documentary Across Platforms

Patricia R. Zimmermann

Description

In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as "documentary" and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision documentary as a complex ecology composed of different technologies, sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles. Through the lens of reverse engineering—the concept that ideas just like objects can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into something new and better—Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through different political terrains, different platforms, and different exhibition contexts. Together these essays demonstrate documentary's role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, communities, and ideas.

Foreword / Gina Marchetti

Introduction: Documentary Across Platforms

Part I: Platforms

1. Reverse Engineering: Taking Things Apart for the New Global Media Ecology

2. Ardent Spaces, Formidable Environments

3. Precious Places, Scribe Video Center, Philadelphia

4. The Hand That Holds Up All This Falling: The Works of Daniel Reeves

5. Cartographies of Impossible and Possible Worlds: The Photography of Michael Kienitz

6. Black Soil: Chernozem and Tusit in Ukraine

Part II: Reversals

7. Matrices of War

8. Blasting War

9. Digital Deployments

10. Public Domains: Engaging Iraq through Experimental Digitalities

11. Cambodian Digital Imaginary Archive: Genocide, Lara Croft, and Crafts

Part III: Histories

12. The Home Movie Archive Live

13. Throbs and Pulsations: Les LeVeque and the Digitizing of Desire

14. Just Say No: Negativland's No Business

15. Remixed and Revisited Black Cinema: Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates Live Project

16. Live!: Reconnecting the Histories of Live Multimedia Performance

17. Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media Documentary

Part IV: Speculative Engineering

18. Home Movie Axioms

19. Speculations on Environmental Sensualities and Eco-Documentaries

20. Speculations on Reverse Engineering: Algorithms for Recombinant Documentaries Across Platforms

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Film
• Documentary film
• History of film
• Película fotográfica
• Genres

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253043504
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Patricia R. Zimmermann
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04346-7 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04347-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04349-8 (web PDF)
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19
For Sean Zimmermann Auyash
and Stewart Auyash
CONTENTS
Foreword by Gina Marchetti

Introduction
Part I Platforms
1 Reverse Engineering: Taking Things Apart for the New Global Media Ecology
2 Ardent Spaces, Formidable Environments
3 Precious Places: Scribe Video Center, Philadelphia
4 The Hand That Holds Up All This Falling: The Works of Daniel Reeves
5 Cartographies of Impossible and Possible Worlds: The Photography of Michael Kienitz
6 Black Soil: Chernozem and Tusit in Ukraine
Part II Reversals
7 Matrices of War
8 Blasting War
9 Digital Deployments
10 Public Domains: Engaging Iraq through Experimental Digitalities
11 Cambodian Digital Imaginary Archive: Genocide, Lara Croft, and Crafts
Part III Histories
12 The Home Movie Archive Live
13 Throbs and Pulsations: Les LeVeque and the Digitizing of Desire
14 Just Say No: Negativland s No Business
15 Remixed and Revisited Black Cinema: Oscar Micheaux s Within Our Gates Live Project
16 Live!: Reconnecting the Histories of Live Multimedia Performance
17 Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media Documentary
Part IV Speculative Engineering
18 Home Movie Axioms
19 Speculations on Environmental Sensualities and Eco-Documentaries
20 Speculations on Reverse Engineering: Algorithms for Recombinant Documentaries across Platforms

Acknowledgments

Index
FOREWORD
J OHN G RIERSON FAMOUSLY DEFINED DOCUMENTARY AS THE CREATIVE treatment of actuality in 1926. 1 However, he certainly did not have the final word on the matter, and the critical engagement of media practitioners with the technologies, aesthetics, politics, and cultural dynamics of nonfiction continues. As a collection of key essays by Patricia Zimmermann, a towering figure in documentary theory, new media, film history, and social critique, Documentary across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics makes an intervention in an evolving field at a critical juncture in its own history. Twitter rants, fake news, alternative facts, and mockumentaries have thrown what Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image calls our faith in the real into crisis. 2 Zimmermann, however, has the rare ability to wade into this morass and shed a light on the vital role documentary plays in effecting social change. While news comes and goes, documentaries endure by providing us with a more capacious picture in which quotidian concerns become part of greater social patterns responsive to political action. Citizen activists, radical artists, and media guerrillas search for ways to speak truth to power, produce meaningful change, and challenge orthodoxies. Ripping through propaganda and pointing to enlightened engagement, documentaries, at their progressive best, offer hope that images can, indeed, transform lives for the better.
Zimmermann s essays span continents and decades, and her critical concerns range from home movies to environmental agitprop. In this book, she calls for an ecology of nonfiction practices to provide a critical platform for thinking beyond more conventional feature-length documentaries aired on public television or screened on the festival circuit. Ecology has its roots in the Greek word oikos , which refers to home as a dwelling place. Although ecology as an interdisciplinary science deals with the relationship of organisms to their environments, the term also has a social dimension. Human ecology concerns the ways in which people interact with institutions within a socially constructed setting. Zimmermann s focus on new documentary ecologies draws on all the rich significations of that term from its link to the domestic in amateur filmmaking to its political engagement with environmentalism and the emerging discipline of ecocriticism. Documentary ecologies, moreover, speak to a deep and sustained critique of human institutions predicated on injustices stemming from capitalist exploitation, sexual and racial inequalities, and imperialist profiteering. As Zimmermann points out, the progressive documentary goes beyond conventional screens and the false dichotomy between art and action by speaking to the need for practitioners to be intimately engaged with their communities as the environments that sustain them.
The digital revolution spawned a plethora of new nonfiction organisms. This burgeoning ecology of installation, performance, new media, and participatory arts defies easy categorization. Zimmermann steps in as a perspicacious guide to an environment that sustains a burgeoning diversity of forms, from YouTube intermediations to hybrid autobiographical installations. With an emphasis on exhibition as well as production, she offers a primer on how documentaries work concretely in local venues such as museums, galleries, concert halls, and community centers as well as globally through transnational digital networks connected to NGOs, trade unions, and political movements around the world. Onscreen and off these documentaries provide alternatives to skewed propaganda and mainstream pablum. Zimmermann, to her considerable credit, does them justice.
Her role as an essayist, in fact, parallels the work of the documentarists she researches. 3 It is certainly no coincidence that the seminal theorist of realism, Hungarian Marxist Georg Luk cs, should also write eloquently about the essay as a literary form. For Luk cs, it is not the essayist s verdict that holds the greatest significance; rather it is the process of judging. 4 The joy of reading this collection rests with following Zimmermann s critical process as it weaves through chapters written over the span of more than twenty years. Theodor Adorno sees the essay as heresy offering a challenge to the conventional modes of thought: By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy s secret purpose to keep invisible. 5 Indeed, these essays bring issues of concern to women, minorities, the disenfranchised, and the dispossessed into clear view.
As Documentary across Platforms demonstrates, the essay allows the writer to take risks, experiment, speculate, and explore in ways that more conventional histories of nonfiction film cannot. Her robust and lively conversations with marginalized works make these essays particularly engaging. Her ideas spring from the scintillating cross-fertilization of arts and activism. Each essay collected here represents a particular moment of engagement with a work as part of a festival, installation, exhibition, or collaboration. However, taken together, they function as far more than the sum of each part. They speak to the preoccupations, insights, and commitments of a scholar who sees documentary inside and outside of institutions such as colleges, universities, museums, and film festivals and who can spotlight the contribution these various works make to the larger tapestry of engaged media arts and progressive public discourse.
Zimmermann blesses documentary film criticism, theory, and history with her heretical views on the subject. She takes her readers away from the feature film and television journalism to show us the world on small screens, in unconventional exhibition spaces, and from people neglected by commercial media outlets. Luk cs celebrates minutia as essential to the essayist s vision of the world, which he calls the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in face of life. 6 This does not mean seeing the world in miniature, but rather the opposite, encountering the world s depths in the details of daily life. Zimmermann captures this smallness in her essays in a way that brings the bigger picture into sharp focus, highlighting the relations of power that prompt the documentarist to take action by taking up the camera. She provides us with what Fredric Jameson in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System calls a cognitive mapping of geopolitical points of contact invisible within the ideological haze favored by for-profit mainstream media. 7
Through mapping the world of the documentary, Zimmermann takes us on an intellectual journey she characterizes as reverse engineering in the volume s opening chapter. She invites us to dismantle these documentaries in order to give us the tools needed to make critical and practical use of them-expanding the nonfiction canon, inspiring new production, and nurturing alternative possibilities for screen activists. When I think of reverse engineering, I imagine a cheeky tinkerer trying to get around patent restrictions by dismantling an overpriced piece of machinery and copying its constituent parts with just enough variation to avoid litigation. This same spirit of righteous piracy animates alternative documentaries that reverse engineer